Installation

1. Add :expublish to the dev dependencies in mix.exs:

{:expublish, "~> 2.5", only: [:dev], runtime: false}

2. Create a CHANGELOG.md in the root folder of the project. It must contain a placeholder:

<!-- %% CHANGELOG_ENTRIES %% -->

3. Put the following line in .gitignore:

RELEASE.md

Alternatively, the RELEASE.md can be kept inside version control and used when publishing from CI. The file is deleted after every succesful release.

4. (Optional) While writing the final package version, Expublish expects the version to be located where mix initially placed it.

As it is quite common to keep the package version in a module attribute in mix.exs, Expublish will consider this as well.

@version "1.0.0"
# ...
version: @version

If the package version is maintained in a separate file, expublish can be made aware of that with the appropriate option: --version-file=VERSION.txt where VERSION.txt is a file containing nothing but the current project version:

1.0.0

Publishing to hex

Before publishing a package for the first time, do read the hex documentation on publishing and add the required metadata in mix.exs.

Regardless of publishing to hex.pm or a self-hosted hex repository, the shell environment where mix expublish is being executed must authenticate for the publishing step to succeed.

Hex.pm usually requires a valid HEX_API_TOKEN to be defined in the current environment, while self-hosted repositories can use a range of various authentication methods.

Check out the hex documenation on self-hosting to learn how to maintain a private package registry.

Prerequisites

Expublish expects git and mix to be available at runtime but comes without any additional dependencies.